On 8 January 1943 Soviet envoys carried surrender terms to the Sixth Army; they were rejected. Two days later the Don Front under Konstantin Rokossovsky opened Operation Ring (Koltso), the final assault on the pocket. By 26 January the pocket had been cut in two at Mamayev Kurgan. Friedrich Paulus, promoted to field marshal the day before, was captured on 31 January, and the last German troops in the northern factory district surrendered on 2 February.

The ultimatum

By the first week of January 1943 the Sixth Army’s position was hopeless by any military measure. The relief force had been driven back beyond Kotelnikovo, the airlift’s main bases had been lost, and the soldiers in the pocket were starving. The Stavka gave Rokossovsky’s Don Front responsibility for destroying the pocket and placed all seven armies around it under his command. The U.S. Army history cites Soviet figures of 281,000 men and 250 tanks for the front in early January, supported by heavy concentrations of artillery.

The attack had been scheduled for 6 January and was postponed to allow the artillery and supplies to be brought up. In the interval Rokossovsky and Colonel General Nikolai Voronov, the Stavka’s artillery representative, sent the Sixth Army a formal demand for surrender, offering food, medical care and, after the war, repatriation. Soviet envoys under a white flag delivered it on 8 January. Paulus, acting under Hitler’s orders not to surrender, rejected it. A second approach the next day met the same answer.

10 January: Ring begins

Operation Ring opened on 10 January 1943 with an artillery bombardment of nearly an hour against the western end of the pocket, a salient around Marinovka and Karpovka known to the Germans as the “nose.” The 65th Army under Pavel Batov made the main attack, with the 21st, 24th, 57th and 64th Armies attacking from other directions and the 62nd and 66th Armies holding in the city and the north. The German divisions in the western pocket were dug in on open steppe, with little fuel and ammunition and almost no reserves.

The western salient collapsed within days. German units fell back east across the frozen steppe toward the city, abandoning heavy weapons and wounded. Pitomnik, the pocket’s main airfield, was lost on 16 January, according to Ziemke and Bauer. The Fourth Air Fleet suspended landings at Gumrak on 17 January, and the field was overrun around 21–22 January; after that the army was supplied only by air-dropped containers. On 22 January Paulus reported more than 12,000 wounded without medical care. Ziemke records that by late January there were some 20,000 uncared-for wounded and as many unarmed stragglers in the ruins.

The scale of the Soviet bombardment is reflected in the Don Front’s ammunition expenditure. The U.S. Army history, citing Soviet figures, gives 911,000 artillery rounds, 990,000 mortar shells and 24 million machine-gun and rifle rounds fired between 10 January and 2 February 1943. On 24 January Paulus asked permission to surrender to save the remaining men; Hitler refused and ordered the army to fight to the last.

Hunger, cold and disease

By January the soldiers in the pocket were living on a small fraction of a normal ration. Horses had long since been slaughtered, and men ate what they could find. Temperatures on the open steppe fell far below freezing, and many soldiers in the western part of the pocket had only snow holes and dugouts for shelter. Frostbite was widespread. Doctors in the pocket reported deaths that they attributed to exhaustion and starvation rather than wounds. Lice spread typhus. The wounded, who could no longer be flown out once Pitomnik and Gumrak were lost, filled cellars in the city where there was little medicine, light or heat.

Discipline held to a remarkable degree, but it frayed. Ziemke records that by late January there were as many unarmed stragglers in the ruins as there were uncared-for wounded. Some soldiers deserted to the Soviets, encouraged by leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts by German communist exiles and prisoners. Others took their own lives. Officers reported that the men’s main concern had become food and warmth rather than the military situation. The army’s last radio messages to Army Group Don combined reports of resistance with descriptions of a force that had ceased to function as an army.

The pocket split

On 26 January troops of the 21st Army, advancing from the west, met the 62nd Army on the northwestern slopes of Mamayev Kurgan, near the Red October workers’ settlement. The pocket was cut in two. In the north, the German XI Corps under General Karl Strecker, with remnants of several divisions, held the Tractor Factory and Barrikady area. In the south, the remaining corps and Sixth Army headquarters were compressed into the city center and the southern districts. On 29 January the southern pocket was split again, leaving Paulus’s headquarters in a small enclave in the center.

For the Germans in the city, the last days were a struggle for shelter and food as much as a battle. Cellars were crowded with wounded and sick men, many suffering from frostbite, dysentery and typhus. Some units surrendered on their own; some generals surrendered with their staffs; others fought on. A few small groups tried to slip out of the city to the southwest, and almost none reached German lines. Soviet assault groups cleared the ruins block by block, as German troops had done in the autumn.

31 January: Paulus surrenders

On 30 January 1943, the tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler promoted Paulus to field marshal. No German field marshal had ever been taken prisoner, and the promotion was widely understood as an invitation to suicide. Paulus did not take it. On the morning of 31 January troops of the Soviet 64th Army, including the 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade, surrounded the Univermag department store on the central square, in whose basement Sixth Army headquarters had been located. The U.S. Army history records that the headquarters’ first message that morning came at 0615 and its last about an hour later.

Paulus surrendered and became, in the words of the U.S. Army history, “the first German officer of that rank ever to be taken prisoner.” He was taken with his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Arthur Schmidt, and his adjutant, Colonel Wilhelm Adam, to the headquarters of General Mikhail Shumilov’s 64th Army at Beketovka, and then to the Don Front headquarters, where he was questioned by Rokossovsky and Voronov. Paulus refused to order the northern pocket to surrender, on the grounds that as a prisoner he no longer commanded.

2 February: the northern pocket

The XI Corps in the northern pocket, about 33,000 men according to the U.S. Army history, held on for about 48 hours after Paulus’s capture. On 1 February Hitler ordered it to fight to the last; the Soviet armies attacked it with massive artillery support. At 0840 on 2 February Army Group Don received Strecker’s last message. Strecker and his staff surrendered that day. Soviet forces counted over 91,000 prisoners in the last phase, among them 24 generals and about 2,500 other officers. Soviet accounts also reported about 147,000 German dead counted on the battlefield.

For the Soviet Union the victory was announced with ceremony. A rally was held in the city’s ruins, and Soviet newspapers published the news on 3 February. In Germany the regime announced the end of the Sixth Army on 3 February, describing it as a heroic last stand, and ordered three days of national mourning. The event the regime had promised as a victory had become an acknowledged catastrophe. The prisoners’ fate, and the meaning of the different numbers, are discussed in Chapter 8.

In the city itself, a victory rally was held on 4 February 1943 on the Square of the Fallen Fighters, the same square on which the Univermag stood, attended by soldiers of the 62nd and 64th Armies and the surviving residents. Clearing the battlefield began at once. Soviet troops collected tens of thousands of German and Soviet dead from the streets and the steppe, mines and unexploded shells were cleared from the main routes, and the prisoners were marched away to camps. Paulus and the other generals were taken to a camp for senior officers near Moscow.

The Soviet armies that carried out Ring also paid heavily. The pocket’s defenders, though starving, still had artillery, machine guns and fortified positions in the ruins, and Soviet assault troops had to clear them block by block in deep cold. The Don Front’s own casualties in January are included in the official totals for the Stalingrad offensive operation discussed in the next chapter. For the 62nd Army, which had held the city since September, the end of the battle came after five months of continuous fighting.

The end of the Sixth Army

The Sixth Army, one of the largest formations in the German army, had ceased to exist. Hitler ordered it rebuilt under the same number, and a new Sixth Army fought on the Eastern Front for the rest of the war. The captured generals, including Paulus, Seydlitz and Schmidt, were held separately from the men. Within months some, including Seydlitz and later Paulus, joined Soviet-sponsored anti-Nazi organizations of German prisoners, the National Committee for a Free Germany and the League of German Officers.

On the Soviet side, the forces freed by the end of the pocket were sent west toward Kharkov and Kursk. Coming two weeks after the opening of a land corridor into besieged Leningrad in Operation Iskra, the surrender gave the Soviet Union its greatest victory of the war so far. The relief attempt that preceded Ring is described in Chapter 6; the next stage of the war in the south leads to Kursk in July 1943.

Gallery · 7 photographs · select to enlarge

The last weeks of the pocket

Sources and further reading

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